Thomas L. Friedman has written a curious piece on why the US sent troops into Iraq, and it has little to do with WMD [via istori/blog]. According to the op-ed piece in the New York Times, there were four types of reason: real, right, moral, and stated. WMD was the stated reason, and it doesn't matter one way or another. The chilling "right" reason was the US needed to make a demonstration to the "Arab-Muslim" world that 9/11 was unacceptable. Who knows? He may be right, but I doubt that having a sitting president lie about the reason(s) for going to war, helps either here or abroad. Sure Saddam's a monster, but there's a bunch more where that came from. Sure it's about oil, as even Mr Friedman admitted grudgingly in a previous piece. So, who does Mr Bush think he's fooling? I think that there were more than four reasons for invading Iraq, and very few of them had neat and tidy categories to fall into like real, right, moral, and stated. Those are all just so many ethical weasel words, and whatever the reasons, ethics had little to do with it.
Weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. [Stewart Chaplin]
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called weasel words. When a weasel sucks eggs, the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a weasel word after another, there is nothing left of the other. [Theodore Roosevelt]
And, in fact, a weasel word has become more than just an evasion or retreat. We've trained our weasels. They can do anything. They can make you hear things that aren't being said, accept as truths things that have only been implied, and believe things that have only been suggested. Come to think of it, not only do we have our weasels trained, but they, in turn, have got you trained. When you hear a weasel word, you automatically hear the implication. Not the real meaning, but the meaning it wants you to hear. [Carl Wrighter]
[via Virtual Salt: Critical Thinking Course]
And our appy-polly-loggies to Mr Benjamin Disraeli for the title munging.
Posted by jim at June 11, 2003 08:14 AMMan, Friedman gets my goat! He's able to present himself as oh so reasonable, quite the opposite of the evil gasbags of the right, but all too often he ends up in the same place. That and his tendency to say three contradictory things in one breath without blinking.
I can't get to his op-ed piece -- for some reason the NYT is now offering to sell it to me for $2.95, a barrier I don't recall seeing before -- so I don't know for sure whether he's contradicting himself in this instance, but it sure sounds like it. Back before the shooting war Friedman was interviewed on the 9/5/2002 Fresh Air and host Terry Gross asked his interpretation of the Bush administration's real reasons for going to war. His ingenuous answer was that "What you see is what you get." Give me a break!
Here's the URL of the interview: http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=day&todayDate=09/05/2002
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle on June 13, 2003 09:54 AM